Apr 7, 2010

My Low-Sodium No Sugar Flax Bread Recipe

I’ve been making bread at home for about 10 years. I began experimenting with my own recipes a couple of years ago. Now I can consistently produce a delicious bread. My objective has been to find the optimal balance between healthiness and taste. In particular, I’ve been trying to use minimum refined carbohydrates and salt. Below is my “optimum” recipe followed by some variations with reinforced and with relaxed constraints.

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups water

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup ground flax seed

2 cups all-purpose unbleached flour

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 1/2 tsp yeast

I recommend using broad and shallow cups as opposed to narrow and deep ones. My experience shows that while water easily fills out a cup of any shape, that is not true for flour. Using narrow and deep cups may result in an overwatered dough that will have to be baked further.

I use a bread machine for both knitting and baking. Feel free to bake it in the stove. The bread will come out better.

Steps

If you keep the yeast in the refrigerator, put 1 1/2 tsp of yeast into a larger container, e.g. in a tbsp, and let it warm up to room temperature.

Pour 2 1/4 cups of water in a larger bowl and microwave it for 1 minute. It should be just warm, not hot. Pour that warm water into the bread machine’s bucket.

Add 1/2 tsp of salt.

Add 1/2 cup of ground flax seed.

Add 2 cups of all-purpose unbleached flour.

Spread about a third of the yeast over the flour. Make sure you don’t drop it in the water - that would be a waste.

Add 1 cup of whole wheat flour.

Spread about half of the remaining yeast over the flour. Make sure you don’t drop it in the water.

Add 1 cup of whole wheat flour.

Spread the rest of the yeast over the flour. Make sure you don’t drop it in the water.

Use the longest program on your bread machine. That’s usually “French Bread” and it takes about 4 hours.

Deviations

More Whole Wheat Flour

To make the bread healthier, replace 1 cup of white flour with 1 cup of whole wheat flour. The bread will not rise as much. It will also need a little bit (1/16 cup) more water. If you still like the bread, you can replace the remaining cup of white flour with whole wheat flour following the same rule. In that case you may also need to increase the salt to 1 tsp to make it rise a bit more and to improve its taste.

More White Flour

If you like puffy bread, you can replace 1 cup of whole wheat flour with white flour. When I did that, my bread got out of the bucket. So if you want to use white flour exclusively, you should bake it in the stove.